Thursday, August 22, 2013

MANIFESTO DESTINATION

It was July, 2001.I
had recently moved to Los Angeles.I
lived in a one-room shithole in the heart of Koreatown.No kitchen.Just a microwave and a hotplate and fridge.I was trying to find an agent to help me get
out of a contract with a manager who has consistently won the award for Biggest
Scumbag in the Universe every year such an award has been given.

So I lied.

In my letters to potential agents, I claimed to have written
a book.One agency wrote back.Said they wanted to see that book.Well, shit.I had been reading a lot of Raymond Chandler (the mandatory thing to do
when one first moves to Los Angeles) and I had been tossing the title,
Manifesto Destination, around in my head for several years.

I was also getting used to sobriety.

And extreme poverty (I know, boo-fucking-hoo…).

So I outlined a book and decided I would sit down and write
it in a week (I had recently quit a suicide-inducing cubicle job at
Ticketmaster, so I had some time).The
first day I sat down to write, a fucking mouse ran across my floor.I hate rodents.I know it’s irrational, but I don’t
care.I went to Westwood to hide out at
the Mystery Bookstore, look at books I couldn’t afford, and bought some mouse
traps on the way home.What I soon
learned was that my apartment (and the building itself) was INFESTED with
rodents.

Thus, I spent a week sitting high off the floor (though I
still had to sleep on the floor while the little fuckers ran around eating
crumbs in the middle of the night—I couldn’t afford a bed) banging out
Manifesto Destination as quickly as possible.

I finished the rough draft, did as good a polish as I could
on it, and sent it to the agency.

No thanks, they said.

Well, fuck ‘em if they can’t take a science
fiction/hardboiled hybrid…

I put the book away for a few years until I ran across an ad
from the some kids in Los Feliz putting together an independent press.They said they’d be thrilled to put out MD
and the little book saw its first publication.They recommended I have someone edit it.I thought they were crazy.I
still have one copy from that run.I was
crazy for not listening to them.

When the whole kindle thing started, I put the book back out
there.It still needed some more edits
and it was formatted like shit for kindle.So I pulled the damn thing from circulation again.

In 2011, to practice publishing through createspace (so Pulp
Modern would look remotely good), I put out a new edition of MD.This time I went through it several times,
cutting out about 3000 words.The few
folks who bought seemed to like it.Then
I pulled it from circulation when a professor at MSU suggested self-publishing
was the kiss of death to any writing career.

Of course, that guy is a stale old fuck who doesn’t know
what the hell he’s talking about, but it scared me bad enough.

Chris Edwards, in the meantime, consistently told me how
much he enjoyed the book.He suggested
last spring that he put it out through Full Dark City, his press.I thought about it a while.Saw what a great job they did with the All
Due Respect anthology, and decided it might not be a bad idea.

That’s an understatement.The work Chris Edwards and Chris Rhatigan have put in to make this the
definitive version of this book is incredible.Just look at the cover.Rhatigan
went through and made further, line by line edits that will make it an even
tighter, smoother read.I’m so excited
by what they’ve done with it that I’ve gotten to work on a follow up novella
that will also take place in Indianapolis.

As for the book itself—a whole lot of influences went into
it.The language is pure
hardboiled.An astute reader will pick
up what I lifted from Philip K. Dick.Particularly
from A Scanner Darkly, a book that played a huge role in convincing me to sober
up when I was younger (in 2001, few people had actually read it, so I felt
quite safe in, ah, ‘borrowing’ from Mr. Dick).It reflects my ongoing distrust of the collusion between psychiatrists
and the pharmaceutical industry (no, I am not nor have I ever been a scientologist!).It is a strangely sentimental book in some
ways.There is a lot of youthful passion
in it (I had not yet turned 30 when I wrote it) and a shameless commitment to
taking an anti-bullshit stance in a world overflowing with bullshit.Little did I know that by September of 2001,
bullshit would become the national anthem…

So there you have it.A brief history of Manifesto Destination.If you take the time to read it, I hope you
enjoy it and I encourage you to hang around for the next book.